Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest Come Of Age as MySpace Loses Ground

Social media is no longer a baby. The latest report on social media from Nielsen and NM Incite indicates that consumers are spending more time with social media than with any other type of website. Approximately 20 percent of the average consumer’s time on a personal computer is spent on a social network, and about 30 percent of their mobile device Internet time is spent on a social network. The total amount of time U.S. consumers spend on social media on both computers and mobile devices went up 37 percent. American consumers spent 121 billion minutes on social networking sites in July of this year. Last July they only spent 88 billion minutes on social media.

Nielsen speculates that the rapid increase in mobile devices has had a major influence on the explosion of social media. The research giant found that although the computer is still the main device consumers are accessing social media through, their mobile use of social media apps and websites has gone up 63 percent this year.

According to Nielsen’s report, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is still the top social network in the country. More than 152 million visitors spend time on Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) on their computers, and more than 152 million visitors spend time on the social media site on their mobile devices, either through mobile apps or by using the Internet on their mobile devices.

Twitter also ranks high, with at least 140 million users and 340 million tweets every day. Twitter has grown 40 percent since the fall of last year.

Nielsen reports that one of this year’s biggest “breakout starts in social media” is Pinterest, which has the largest increase year-over-year, both in unique visitors and the amount of time spent on the site through computers and mobile devices. Pinterest recorded a 1,047 percent increase in unique computer users in one year.

Other social media sites that saw massive increases were Google+, which increased in use by 80 percent in one year in unique computer users, and Tumblr, which saw a 55 percent increase in unique computer users in one year. Wikia increased 20 percent in unique computer users in one year.